The Columbian | Serving Clark County, Washington

Thank you, Massachusetts. In a history-changing special election, Scott Brown’s Jan. 18 victory over his Democratic opponent to become Massachusetts’ junior senator was a referendum on Obama’s massive reform of health care.

During the campaign, Brown, showing a sure sense of the electorate as well as uncommon courage, vowed to become the 41st vote

against the measure, thus breaking the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority. He won handily, buoyed by a 2-to-1 majority of independent voters. Exit polls showed that 42 percent of voters backed Brown specifically to stop the health care bill.

In one of the many applause lines of his acceptance speech, Brown drew the conclusion that “people do not want the trillion-dollar health care plan that is being forced on the American people.” The plan now appears unlikely to survive the fallout from Brown’s victory.

To quote Winston Churchill, “Never … was so much owed by so many to so few.” The “few” would be Brown and his campaign strategists who carried out a flawless campaign.

In Washington state, we should all be thanking Scott Brown. The measure’s impact on our state’s beleaguered budget would have been disastrous.

How bad off are we? The Evergreen Freedom Foundation, the Olympia-based think tank, tells us that we have a larger per capita deficit than California. If California is famously teetering on the financial brink, can we be far behind in paying our state’s bills with IOUs?

The Columbian’s Jan. 10 cover story on the convening of the Washington Legislature highlights the $2.6 billion revenue shortfall that may leave the state unable to pay its bills this summer. It seems likely that the deficit will expand to $7.6 billion in the next budget cycle. And with minimal timber, aluminum, mining, or other extractive industries left in the state, and with Boeing opening a second assembly line for the 787 in South Carolina, we’re forced to await the next upswing in real estate, an industry on which we are dangerously dependent in Southwest Washington.

States under pressure

Without Scott Brown’s victory and its subsequent political fallout, Obama’s health care plan might easily have pushed our state over the financial cliff. According to a Jan. 14 analysis by the Heritage Foundation (“Expanding Medicaid: The Real Costs to the States”), the reform measure (both House and Senate versions) expands coverage primarily by expanding the federal-state Medicaid program, a provision that accounts for between three-fifths and four-fifths of the projected reduction in the uninsured population.

Under the House bill, the federal government will not pay for all of the expansion, leaving a payment gap for the states to fill amounting to 9 percent of the benefit costs after 2014; for the Senate bill, the shortfall is between 5 percent and 19 percent, depending on the state. The burden from benefit costs doesn’t include the added administrative costs. According to the Heritage Foundation study, such hidden costs add an average of 5.5 percent on top of total benefits.

For our state, under the House bill, the estimated additional costs for the Medicaid expansion for the federal fiscal years 2014-2019 will amount to $655 million for benefits and $197 million for administrative costs, for a total of $852 million. Under the Senate bill, the impacts total somewhat less at $646 million. But either version would add another big splash of red ink when we can least afford it.

Those are just our state’s problems coping with Obama Care. For New York, a state already near financial collapse, the additional cumulative burden of both benefits and administration costs for 2014-2019 is $2.6 billion under the Senate bill and $3.1 billion under the House bill. For California, similarly tottering toward financial collapse, the impact is estimated at up to $8.6 billion. These states would doubtless look to us federal taxpayers for bailouts, and again, we would hear that “they’re too big to fail.”

With Scott Brown’s victory, we may have dodged a bullet.

Ann Donnelly, a Vancouver businesswoman, is a former chair of the Clark County Republican Party. E-mail: adonnelly7@comcast.net.

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